A Blog started and maintained by four children who write about love, happiness, hope, strength and how our Mom finished her 7 year fight with gastric cancer from 2008 - 2015

"Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase"

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

PET scan

Today is Mom's PET scan. We'll get the results January 4th.

What is a PET scan?

Positron emission tomography (PET) is a highly sensitive technology that uses a radioactive substance to show the chemical and functional changes within the body.

Chemical and functional changes cannot be seen by other imaging methods, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or computed tomography (CT).
A PET scan measures body functions such as blood flow, oxygen use and sugar metabolism to help doctors evaluate how well your child's organs and tissues are functioning.
Images obtained from a PET scan help doctors diagnose a problem, choose the best treatment and/or see how well a treatment is working.
PET scans can be particularly useful when they are digitally combined with the images generated from MRI or CT.
The radiopharmaceutical used is designed to go to the part of the body that is being tested.

A common type of radiopharmaceutical, fluorine-18 FDG (fluorodeoxyglucose), acts almost exactly like sugar.
The body uses sugar for fuel, so the radioactive sugar goes to the parts of the body that are very active, such as the brain, the heart and the muscles.
The PET scanner can "read" any chemical changes within those areas.